Craig Mayhew’s Blog

A quick way to increase the responsiveness of firefox is to turn off the disk cache and turn on the memory cache. This will keep a cache of recently visited websites/images in the computers RAM instead of on the hard disk.

Go into about:config and set browser.cache.disk.enable to FALSE, then right-click and select NEW -> INTEGER and type browser.cache.memory.capacity and set to 100000 (for 100mb).

Now your memory is being used for the cache instead of your hard disk. If you have loads of memory (more the 2GBs) then you could set the cache figure to say 200mb or higher for even better performance.

1. Login to your vmware server.
3. Backup your virtual machine and all snapshots (The raw files on the physical disk – particularly the vmdk files as this will be what we are modifying)
4. Login to vmware gui.
5. Power off your virtual machine (do not pause it!).
6. Delete all snapshots for this machine
7. Locate vmware-vdiskmanager.exe and adjust paths to run the following command (Change sie in GB as you require):
8. C:\Users\user>”C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Server\vmware-vdiskmanager.exe” -x 1000GB “D:\Windows 7\Windows 7.vmdk”
9. Once that has run (it will take some time). Try powering on your virtual machine (mine crashed the first time around when I logged in via remote desktop but was fine after logging in via vmware browser plugin).
10. Once logged into the windows 7 virtual machine: Open control panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management
11. In the left menu click Storage -> Disk Manager
12. You should see your drives with blue bars. Your C drive should have a block of unpartitioned space that was created by the vdiskmanager in the previous steps. Right click on C drive and click “extend volume”.
13. Follow the prompts – default values should be fine
14. Done

Ubuntu versions 10.04 and 10.10 had various issues with the screen brightness on my HP EliteBook 8530w. It wasn’t possible to adjust the brightness which was a real problem if the screen dimmed while power saving.

The only fix I’ve found was to update to Ubuntu version 11.04.

Upgrading the turnkey vm of redmine can be painful:

Hopefully this will take away some of the pain :)

cd /var/www
mv railsapp railsappOLD
svn co http://redmine.rubyforge.org/svn/branches/1.0-stable railsapp
cp ./railsappOLD/config/database.yml ./railsapp/config/database.yml
cp ./railsappOLD/config/email.yml ./railsapp/config/email.yml
cp -r ./railsappOLD/files ./railsapp/files
sudo chown -R root:www-data /var/www/railsapp
cd /var/www/railsapp
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data files log tmp
gem install rails -v=2.3.5
gem install rack
gem install rack -v=1.0.1
rake generate_session_store
gem install -v=0.4.2 i18n
rake generate_session_store
rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data files log tmp public/plugin_assets
rake db:migrate:upgrade_plugin_migrations RAILS_ENV=production
rake db:migrate_plugins RAILS_ENV=production
sudo chmod -R 755 files log/ tmp/ public/plugin_assets
rake tmp:cache:clear
rake tmp:sessions:clear
sudo reboot

For anyone that has accidentally clicked on an apllication, clicked “open with” and set it to open with another application by default. Here is how to fix it.

If you are lucky enough to still have a web browser open or some way of transferring files then put this file on your computer and run it. It will remove the default association for exe files.

http://www.craigmayhew.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/exe.reg

If you aren’t lucky enough to be able to get this file to your damaged computer then you need to follow the steps in this Microsoft article.

As soon as I switched to beThere and the appalling TG585v7 router they sent me I ran into VPN issues. Absolutly no outgoing VPN connections would work through this router. There is normally something called “VPN Pass Through” that needs enabling on routers to allow outgoing VPN connections. Unfortunately this router has no way of doing that through the web interface so I was forced to use the following “solution”.

This will require you to have a spare DSL router as we will be turning the Thomson router into just a modem by using “bridging”. You will also need your static IP, subnet mask, gateway IP and DNS server IP addresses which Be should have sent you in your welcome email.

1. Plug your spare router into one of the ethernet ports on the back of the bebox.
2. Login to your bebox
3. Click “Thomson Gateway”
4. Click “Configuration”
5. Click “Setup”
6. Click “Next”
7. Select “Bridge”, Click “Next”
8. When asked, add your IP and DNS info.
9. Reboot router, it may do this automatically
10. Your “spare” router is now your actual router, plug the rest of your computers/network into it instead of the bebox.
11. Your VPN should now work.

If anyone else has a better solution than this, please drop something in the comments box below.

If it helps, the manual can be downloaded from here:
http://www.technostation.com/documents/26049/thomson-tg585v7

The most secure method of transfering files to and from your web server is via ssh. Here’s how to set it up and some of the pitfalls to avoid.

If you are using Putty generated key files they first need to be converted to openSSH before they can be used by NuSphere. If you are using Putty (Pageant) then instructions on how to do this can be found here. If not then please ignore that link and continue on…

1. Goto PHPED accounts, “keys” tab, create new SSH setting.
   
2. If you already have your keys then select no. Otherwise select yes and PHPED will auto generate a key pair for you. (Please note the server needs a copy of your public key)
   
3. Enable “Public key (ssh2)” auth method and add your OpenSSH key to “Public identity files” (Unless PHPED auto generated it for you, in which case it should already be there!).
   
4. Create new SFTP or SSH “accounts” on Account tab. In options set “SSH setting” to the one you have just created.
5. Enjoy your SSH uploads.

I recently needed to convert my Putty SSH files into OpenSSH so I could use them in NuSphere.

1. Open your private key in PuTTYGen
2. Export it in OpenSSH format. Top menu “Conversions”->”Export OpenSSH key”.
3. Save the new OpenSSH key when prompted.

For my and your reference, here’s a list of my firefox addons that I’m currently using :)

Am I missing any good ones?

Thunderbird 3 is awesome, I’ve only had one issue with it and that’s when it used up all the space on my primary drive. I thought it was odd but moved my thunderbird profile to it’s own drive. I realised the sent items just kept getting bigger literally as the minutes past. I opened my sent items to find it had duplicated every email about 25 times (and was still duplicating them) this gave me a sent items box that was fast approachiung 30GBs! I downloaded the thunderbird deduplication addon which is available here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/956. It removed the duplicate emails but even after running a compact my sent items didn’t change size on disk. In the end I renamed the sent item files “Sent” and “Sent.msf” to “sent.damaged” and “Sent.msf.damaged” and Thunderbird downloaded a fresh copy. Then once I was sure the emails hadn’t been wiped out, I deleted the broken files completely.

So far, I haven’t had a repeat of this issue and I do not know what caused it. At a guess my Sent Items were corrupted somehow.